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Riotous League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Ramps Up the Apocalypse in 2009

The Antichrist's eyes (and other parts of his anatomy) make quite an impression in Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's hilariously phantasmagoric The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009.

The apocalypse arrives in the latest, and perhaps freakiest, installment of writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book series. But who knew the nastiest weapon of the end times was in the Antichrist's pants all along?

And who would have guessed that the Antichrist would turn out to be a mutant Harry Potter, who is a twist on Neil Gaiman's boy magician Timothy Hunter, who in turn is a permutation of a young King Arthur? Or that the immortal omnisexual Orlando and Dracula's now-deathless Mina Murray would serve as the chief hero(in)es in the historically twisted, acidly satirical comic series purportedly anchored by incredibly heroic males?

Those are the vertiginous points of departure The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 (which we'll call LXG: 2009 from here on out). On its surface, the concluding chapter of Moore and O'Neill's third volume of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics is about Murray and Orlando's search for the dark-magic spawn birthed in the previous chapter, last year's comparatively carefree The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1969.

Only four decades have elapsed, but as Moore told Wired last year after LXG: 1969 landed, the death of the optimistic '60s is light-years away from the last throes of the dehumanized '00s, when mercilessly violent occupations and desensitized brutality are tearing the world apart.

"By the time you get to 2009, I think there will be little disguising of the fact that Kevin and I are perhaps not that fond of the current era and its culture," Moore said at the time. "Readers are going to see a contraction of culture into a much more mean, starved and possibly diminished state than when we started Century in a great blaze of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill."

(Spoiler alert: Plot points and a look at the Antichrist's junk follow, so stop reading now, whiners and prudes, unless you want another reason to cry.)

Despite the fact that Moore is an obvious master of language and literature, "mean, starved and possibly diminished" doesn't even begin to describe the downward-spiraling dystopia of LXG: 2009. Compared to LXG: 1969's multihued psychedelia, LXG: 2009 – an 80-page volume out now in the United States from Top Shelf Productions ($9.95 print, $4.99 digital) and in the United Kingdom from Knockabout Comics – is a mostly monochromatic nightmare.

It opens with conscienceless gore as Orlando massacres his military comrades, enemies and bystanders alike in Iraq. It continues in London's ultraviolent streets, where someone is always suffering a beatdown. And it horrifically ends in the suburbs with a slang-spouting, physically regenerating, eyeball-ridden Antichrist getting repeatedly blown into gore, before reaching into his pants and pulling out his penis for a (literally) sexually charged payback.

The bleak environs and action, magnified into lunacy like our own madnesses, are so outer-limits that one cannot help but laugh. Moore and O'Neill enhance that divine tragicomedy with riotous deviations including a horny mental hospital (named after Freud), profane graffiti, ludicrous marketing, a metafictional underground club and far more in-jokes than you can count.

Some personal favorites? The new album "Oh, Who Cares?" by fake pop band Drive Shaft from the existentially pointless Lost; a street Samaritan bravely collecting money for "Obese Children in Need;" and Absolutely Fabulous' itinerant drunk and drug addict Patsy Stone as an MI6 agent. As with past LXG' installments, sturdy indexer Jess Nevins is going to have a field day annotating LXG: 2009.

Yet in a delicious narrative twist, LXG: 2009 boasts a mostly happy ending. That's not to say that no one important dies or that the end times disappear after a superheroic Mary Poppins arrives to clean up the soulless carnage. As LXG's longtime big bad Oliver Haddo tells Mina near LXG: 2009's end, "The strange and terrible new aeon is unavoidable, but not the one that I anticipated. I am not to be its harbinger. That honour falls to you. Congratulations."

Which is Moore and O'Neill's way of telling us all – through The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's densely disorienting metanarrative and seemingly bottomless cast of characters – that both the comic and our own reality's most heinous horrors await us. As Moore told me last year, LXG might even venture past this century into the beyond.

"We’d like to roll out the League's cosmos into the actual cosmos, to be able to include the fictions of other worlds," he said. "That would be something we would be looking at very strongly."